Nicolas Cole’s Popular Sophistry

And the reality that undercuts self-help twaddle

On December 9 I received a Medium Creator Newsletter by email. The newsletter dispenses advice on how to improve your reach as a writer on the platform, and it quotes from the author of “Let Go of the Quest to Go Viral,” who says (with my emphasis),

Do not chase algorithms. Do not read articles on how to “make it” on Medium. Do not create headlines that scare the living daylights out of people so they click on them, searching for some elusive answer to life’s unanswerable questions. Instead, write a story in a huff while you’re crying. Crawl back under the sheets and workshop the story with your dog. Chase the flow-feeling. Be naïve.

Meanwhile, every day on my Medium feed I receive articles on how to succeed as a writer on that platform.

I receive them likely because I click on these articles reflexively, not because I’m interested in the advice but to amuse myself by judging the depth of the hackery involved in writing them. I click on an article like this to see if it includes even a single original thought. Then I proceed to the second phase, which is to click on the author’s homepage to see if he or she is only taking a break with this article, or whether there’s a disappointing pattern in the author’s body of work.

Nicolas Cole’s Writing Advice

Currently, you see, there’s a fad on Medium. In addition to the startup and self-help articles which are staples for mainstream readers, there’s the subgenre of how to succeed and make money specifically on the platform that hosts these articles. There are authors who specialize not in saying anything of direct interest, but in telling readers how they should write if they want to make a business out of it.

One of these authors is Zulie Rane, whom I criticized for underestimating the conflict between artistic and business sensibilities, and who responded by blocking me on Medium.

Another is Nicolas Cole who is wildly popular on Medium, with 85K followers. He presents himself as an expert in self-help and online writing. He sells the “ultimate guide” on startwritingonline.com, and he writes marketing books too. His Medium articles generally seem to be in these meta-areas, with titles like, “The Secret To Writing High-Performing Content” and “3 Ways To Be A Missionary In Business And Make Your Company Matter.”

I read one of his articles, called “Why So Many Writers Fail To Make Money.” That article received 6.4K claps and 65 comments (at last count).

Cole addresses that article to the writers who are wondering, “I wrote something. Now why isn’t the world applauding? Why aren’t I making any money?” Cole’s answer is that many writers labor under the mistaken idea that the words they choose are as important as whether the article makes the reader think.

“Writing is not a game of words,” he says, which took him “a decade to figure out.” Nor is writing about “style” or an “innate gift.” Instead, Cole announces, “Writing is a game of thinking.”

Now, when I reached that point in the article, I thought the author was going to start spouting philosophy. If writing’s a game of thinking, that would seem to imply that writing should be thought-provoking, and what’s more thought-provoking than philosophy? In any case, where I come from, it goes without saying that if you’re bothering to say something, you might as well try to elevate the discourse.

Yet no sooner does Cole announce his thesis than he lists the reasons he knows that writing is about thinking. They’re:

Because 50 Shades of Grey has sold more than 150 million copies worldwide, and it’s filled with mediocre words. Because the Twilight series has sold more than 100 million copies worldwide and its words are arguably even more mediocre than Grey’s mediocre words. Tim Ferriss’s 4-Hour Work Week reads like a life advice montage you’d find on YouTube narrated by a supplement company bro (which it was), and it sold more than 2 million copies.

And he goes on and on in that vein, listing poorly written texts that nevertheless are bestsellers. His point is that whereas “All of these books changed the world in some way,” none “are going to go down in history on the same bookshelf as Hemingway, Nabokov, Dostoevsky, or Woolf.”

Thus, Cole says, a writer is “in the thinking game,” not the writing one. “And the amount of money you make from your words is directly correlated to the amount you can influence the reader’s thinking” (his emphasis). Instead of repeating “the same ideas, thoughts, and conclusions the reader already knows,” a writer should instill radical “new ideas,” and transform those ideas “into powerful new conclusions (leading them [the readers] to make fundamentally different decisions in their life).” If you can do that, “you’re in business.”

The written words are “borderline irrelevant” because the readers are “in it for your thoughts.”

Art versus Commerce

I can’t help but notice a discrepancy in his case, however. If Cole is extolling the kind of writing that makes the reader think and that even boasts radical new ideas, why does Cole present as examples not just mediocre writings but relatively thoughtless ones?

What are the radical new ideas in “50 Shades of Grey” or in the Twilight novels about teen vampires? I’m pretty sure the former series of books didn’t break much new ground since the kinky sex thing has been around for thousands of years, what with sex being so universal to the human experience. Likewise, vampires are old news. As for the “4-Hour Work Week,” that’s just another pandering self-help book. There’s a gazillion of them.

No, ask yourself where you’d have to go to find genuinely challenging pieces of writing, the kind dedicated to making you think. Would you be more likely to find them at the top of the barrel or at the bottom? Would they sell the best or would they be overlooked because most readers want to be reassured rather than confronted and challenged?

Obviously, the most intellectual works tend to sell the poorest. You find them in academia which is walled off from mainstream society and which almost no one would prefer to read. And that’s why the films that jaded critics love and that win the coveted awards aren’t usually blockbusters. They’re small, artistic, independent movies that regular audiences don’t have the time or patience for. It’s the same with novels, music, visual art, and every other artform.

The most popular works seldom have any philosophical merit.

Moreover, those ground-breaking works that happen to become mainstream are exceptions that prove the rule. Trent Reznor’s band Nine Inch Nails, for example, took industrial music into the mainstream, while Nirvana did the same with grunge. Often when that happens, the artist feels pressure to conform to the normies’ vanilla tastes, and it doesn’t end well.

You see, there’s a chasm separating what the artist feels inspired to do — namely, to rock the establishment with fearless, subversive insights and unconscious expressions — and what works best and sells the most. That’s why the genuine artists who beat the odds often take drugs, to dull their artistic drive and to end the torment they’d otherwise inflict on themselves for selling out. When the drugs lose their numbing effect and the conflict proves unbearable, these tortured artists often kill themselves.

Sophistical Persuasion

Thus, we should discount the straightforward interpretation of Cole’s message here. Clearly, Cole can’t be recommending that writers challenge mainstream worldviews since that would be a sure-fire recipe for commercial failure.

That’s just as well because in “The Future Of Digital Writing: Why 80,000 Followers On Medium Means Nothing,” Cole laments that despite his many followers, “the average thing I write here receives less than 500 views.” Indeed, he says, ‘There’s only one way to “win” at online writing, and that’s volume…In order to do this on Medium, I have written extensively about how you need to basically be writing & publishing something new on a daily basis, month after month, year after year.’

Does that mean quantity matters more than quality? Can everyone or perhaps even anyone publish a new, genuinely thought-provoking article every single day, year after year?

Indeed, if you read Cole’s other article carefully, you can discern a hidden message in it. He ends, for example, by back-peddling when he says, “most writers fail because they’re too focused on the words, and completely unaware of how undifferentiated their thoughts are” (my emphasis). And recall how he emphasized that the writer should be trying to “influence the reader’s thinking.”

That’s a curious, amorphous word to use, “influence,” especially when combined with the examples of vulgar nonsense that Cole cites for inspiration. A writer with intellectual integrity would attempt to challenge the reader’s thinking by presenting thoughtful arguments or evidence to support a fresh perspective. But Cole evidently has in mind something less platonic and more sophistical. He’s saying the writer should “differentiate” her platitudes not by thinking them through or by rationally justifying them, but by disguising them with rhetorical tricks.

For example, in partaking of the fad of teaching writers how to succeed in the business of online writing, you might do what Nicolas Cole has evidently done, which is to write an article that boldly declares that the writing quality is irrelevant because what matters is “thinking” — as if you could think well without well-chosen words.

Next, you’d have to realize you’d just gone too far since too much thinking will land your work at the bottom of the pile, quite unpurchased. In backing up your opinion, then, you’d have to contradict yourself by citing the thoughtless bestsellers that succeed in “influencing” their audience only by manipulating people’s emotions, not by making anything like an intellectually respectable, thought-provoking case. And you’d have to prettify this slapdash self-help article with a slick conversational tone and with the typical bite-sized words, sentences, and paragraphs.

Networked Lemmings

Oh, and if you’re a writer who cares about the truth, you might want to disregard the plethora of hackneyed self-help articles and take to heart the sad fact that the earnings for networked contents typically fall into a power-law distribution, as Clay Shirky pointed out a couple decades ago.

The easier the access to the market, or the more democratic the creative process and the more candidates throw their hat into the ring, the more imbalanced the number of superstars compared to that of the struggling contenders. This is because the ratio between their shares of the earnings will stay the same and it will greatly disappoint the majority.

What causes a breakthrough for the few lucky content creators is often something as accidental as a minor advantage that the audience can glom onto, which accelerates the inequality like the chaotic butterfly effect. As Shirky said, “If we assume that any blog [or other form of content] chosen by one user is more likely, by even a fractional amount, to be chosen by another user, the system changes dramatically.”

Suppose there’s a network of only ten writers with hundreds of paying readers between them. Eighty percent of the earnings will go to twenty percent of the content creators, which means roughly two writers will stand out as superstars compared to the other eight, and those eight will toil away like unappreciated slaves. There’s no middle ground in these networks.

Now suppose there are around two hundred thousand writers, as there are on Medium, and a hundred million readers. In that case, again a teeny-tiny minority will make a living on the platform, dividing the lion’s share of the earnings between them, while a huge majority of the writers will earn far less than minimum wage for their efforts, with no middle class to speak of. Perhaps only a few thousand writers will earn a living on that platform, while well over a hundred thousand will receive relatively little attention or money, regardless of the quality of their work.

These are called “scale-free networks,” and another expert points out that in these cases, “few nodes exhibit extremely high connectivity (essentially scale-free) while the vast majority are relatively poorly connected.” This happens for structural reasons, having little if anything to do with the content’s merits. These structural reasons include the following considerations:

• “Rapid growth confers preference to early entrants”
• “In an environment of too much information people link to nodes that are easier to find”
• “The greater the capacity of the hub (bandwidth, work ethic, etc.) the faster its growth.”

The network’s algorithms, for example, might pile on by distributing more widely the most popular authors’ articles. The algorithms thus bury potential hidden gems and make it easier for readers to act like lemmings by picking the lowest hanging fruit. And if the audience members are allowed to interact on the platform, such as by writing comments to each other, they’ll be free to share links to their favourite content creators, which over time widens the inequality.

The upshot is that no matter what writers do, relatively few of them will ever succeed commercially on an open platform. Only a tiny percentage of content creators can become superstars, and the vast majority won’t earn even minimum wage. The network’s structure and social nature ensure that that’s so.

Therefore, the self-help craze about how to make it as an online writer is sustained by delusions. The advice given is irrelevant. Even if every writer on an open platform followed all the self-help advice to the letter, still the network’s structure would guarantee that almost all the earnings would go to a tiny percentage of the writers. Commercially speaking, most online writers will always fail on these networks, no matter what they do. Period.

What the happy-talking self-help dispensers leave out of their pandering platitudes is the impact of the network’s structure on how contents are distributed. The medium of Medium is largely its message.

And even if the self-help advice manages to propel a few writers to success who wouldn’t otherwise have accidentally made it past the threshold in the power law dynamic, the tone of the self-help articles would have to change.

Instead of being upbeat and holding out the optimistic promise that all writers should try to make a living on the online platforms, these self-help authors should confess that, instead of being meritocracies, these platforms are more like lotteries in which most participants are bound to lose no matter what they do. And there’s no self-help industry telling us how to beat the odds in picking numbers from a random number generator.

Testing the Creator Economy

Let’s perform a little test, then, shall we? What I just said about scale-free networks conforming to power law distributions of earnings for content is a challenging thought. Have a look, then, at whether the most popular self-help authors, such as Zulie Rane or Nicolas Cole ever challenge their audiences by presenting them with such a sobering fact.

Are these sell-out superstars crushing it only by “influencing” their readers’ thinking, that is, by tricking them with sophistry and flattery? Do they specialize in the hackneyed domain of self-help because they have nothing substantive to say? And are they changing people’s thinking with intellectual and artistic honour, or do business concerns tend to defeat the enterprises of philosophy and art?

If you’re looking for answers that tell the unvarnished truth, start with the bottom of the barrel.